In the weeks since it launched, Dragon Age: Inquisition has been getting rave reviews and players are happily losing hours and hours of their lives to scouring the ends of Ferelden doing good deeds for the Inquisition.

And while they're doing that, they're finding a lot of cheese.

CNET's exclusive investigation into the hidden havartis of Inquisition began when we fell down a terraced area in a town and discovered something a little strange: a skeleton with a pile of playing cards and an enormous wheel of cheese. There was no info, nothing to loot, just death, gaming and cheese. It was momentously odd.

The cheese wheel that got this whole thing rolling.
Nic Healey

A call went out on social media, looking for anyone else who may have found Roquefort behind rocks, Tommes in towns, Camembert in castles, draconic d'Affinois or any other strange dairy products in their travels. The responses flooded in.

Cheeses in the snow, cheeses being held by statues, oversized cheeses on bed-side tables -- even one cheese directly under a fade rift. In Dragon Age: Inquisition you never need to ask "where's the cheese?" -- it's absolutely everywhere.

And then there's the Wedge of Destiny: a piece of cheese that, when looted, turns into a shield that is essentially a wheel of cheese with a knife stuck into it. Yes, it can be equipped and, according to the codex entry on it, it was created when a dragon scale fell into a dairy farm...

The cheesy bites of Inquisition aren't the only easter egg you'll find -- hunt around and see if you can locate the Plants vs Zombies reference -- but the sheer number of cheeses in weird places suggests that somewhere along the creation process, this became an in joke for the dev team. We reached out to Bioware who told us that the cheese was "tradition":

We've had cheese hidden in every Dragon Age game since Origins. It's not new, just more people noticing, because we made a shield this time.

While we would hate to argue with the creators of the games, it does certainly feel as if they've doubled-down on the crazy cheddar for Inquisition. After all, you never saw multiple cheese wheels surrounded by the skeletons of musicians in Origins...